"Stories of what I see" - Happy, Coming Up, Act 2
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controlled explosion
My first involvement with the theatre was as an actor, in the Wet Paint Theatre Company performing the plays of Chris Ward, under his direction, with a motley collection of actors, band members and punks alongside me. I now am privileged to count Chris as one of my closest friends, and directed a couple of his plays at the White Bear, most recently Plastic Zion. Chris has now reconfigured Wet Paint and is reviving two of his best plays - Demonstration of Affection and Planet Suicide - under his own direction at the Foundry in Shoreditch for a three week repertory season. I went to see Demonstration of Affection tonight, and it is an extraordinary event. As Chris's mate, I am both delighted and immensely proud to be able to write the following about it, and I mean every word.
Demonstration of Affection was first performed at the Cockpit Theatre and then the Arts in 1981, in a production starring Richard Jobson of the Skids and Honey Bane. It was one of the few Ward plays I hadn't seen or read, so I was intrigued to see what it was like after hearing about it for so many years. Chris has gathered a cast of four superb performers to enact this intense study of four lost people wounding and tormenting each other during a single night's season in hell. There isn't much plot, nor could there be, as the characters have dropped out of society's story of work and family existence and holed themselves up to grasp at the receding dream of a better world; they make a madder, more intense, more direct and painful prison for themselves in the process. The subculture they inhabit reminds me of Steven Shaviro's description (in Doom Patrols) of "what Foucault calls heterotopias: other-spaces, or spaces of otherness, in contrast to utopian non-spaces […] Heterotopias, unlike utopias, have bulk, weight, and friction; they are never exempt from the power relations and constraints of the societies that spawn them. Indeed, heterotopias express these relations and constraints even to excess[…]But in so doing, they map out points of fracture in the fabric of their culture; they twist the social forms of which they are composed into strange new ungainly shapes." Chris has indeed mutated theatre into an innovative form, one completely suitable for the world, characters and historical period he was writing about; yet in saying the play is rooted in the (1981) historical, I don't mean to suggest that the play is dated - in many ways Chris is a prophetic writer, as the sense of disconnection with both the sureties of the past & its conformist present manifestations (phoney values and a living death) and a loss of any possibility of revolution or progressive change building a better world (a child's dream) is a state of being which increasing numbers of people inhabit; they might not dress punk but they live that disassociated free-falling nihilism. His characters are our secret truth.
The four actors - Nicola Weston completes the cast as punkette Cressida (the nearest this bunch gets to a voice of sanity pleading for them to stop destroying each other) - reach a controlled intensity I haven't seen on the stage for many years; when I have seen it, it's usually been at gigs rather than in a play. Tables and glasses and actors fly around the stage, intermingling in the charged air with a poetic language the like of which I don't reckon any other living playwright could achieve. It is as if Private Lives were rewritten by Arthur Rimbaud and acted by Sid and Nancy. It's certainly like little else you can see at this era, but in the age of Big Brother contestants tearing each other apart on live TV, disaffected kids going on the rampage in education establishments from Germany to the States and people facing a future of Imperial wars, terrorist attacks and global insecurity, the time for Demonstration of Affection is ripe and now.
The Wet Paint season - which I am glad to see is packing the audiences in - is playing at the Foundry - a strange Oasis of cheap drinks and art school decadence in the midst of the city's corporate belly - until 27 April. Demonstration itself is being performed on Thursday and Friday 24 & 25, with Planet Suicide on 17-20 and 26 & 27. Get yourself down there if you want to see a bout of genuinely thrilling, cathartic and still totally cutting edge theatre. Due to the licensing on the venue, the admission is free - and what could be better than all that? Give it a go. I hope like me you'll find yourself inspired and exhilarated.
Bookings can be made on 020 7923 2873 and 07983 047 446.
Production photos by Rufus Exton.